Walz rewards teachers’ union with huge spending bill
As Gov. Tim Walz rolled out his education budget for 2023, Center of the American Experiment reminded Minnesotans that there is no correlation between Walz’s favorite solution, more money, and improved academic achievement. In fact, as the following graph shows, test scores for reading and math have fallen precipitously over the last 10 years as funding has skyrocketed.
Statement from Education Policy Fellow Catrin Wigfall:
“Gov. Walz knows monetary inputs won’t miraculously produce better results for Minnesota students, but today’s announcement is not about students, it’s about adults. Specifically, putting more money into a broken system without asking for proven reforms will reward the teachers’ union for their support in his reelection campaign at the expense of students.”
The teachers’ union has blocked every major education reform in Minnesota history from charter schools to school choice. American Experiment is highlighting the union’s role in blocking education reform at www.EdMnHurtsProgress.com.
Different challenge, same tired solution for childcare crisis
Gov. Walz proposed the same failed strategy for improving childcare access for Minnesota families: more state money. American Experiment explained how adding more state money to the system actually produces the opposite result — less access. Child Care Crisis: Regulation and the High Cost of Childcare showed subsidies and other public early childhood education programs raise costs, restrict choice, fail to meet parental preferences, and are often associated with negative outcomes among children that use them.
Statement from American Experiment Economist Martha Njolomole:
“Simply throwing more money at the problem will not fix the childcare crisis. Daycare centers are more expensive in Minnesota compared to most states mainly because of excessive regulation. The crisis is government-made.”
Compared to the Present, Trump Era Was a Golden Age
As much as one is tempted to blame the “elites,” and they are truly contemptible, the American people share responsibility for failing to rebuke the yoke of this new world order.
Excusing his tendency to hyperbole, one finds it hard to disagree when Donald Trump talks about how much better things were before the “China virus” ruined his reelection effort and set the country on a path of decline. The America that existed before COVID, the George Floyd revolution, and the rigged 2020 election is not so far in the past, but it was a completely different world.
Gas was cheap, crime was down, the border was secure, and the country was a lot freer. Words like “misinformation” were seldom heard on the lips of bureaucrats or neighbors deputized by them, and one didn’t fear losing employment or the right to travel for refusing an experimental drug. Believe it or not, before those momentous, nightmarish months of violence and upheaval that changed everything, Trump was on a glide path to victory, having been cleared of impeachment over a long-forgotten “perfect phone call” with Ukraine.
The televised drama of the Trump years has proven fairly benign compared to what followed. Consider the events of just the past week. Thousands of U.S. flights were grounded, an increasingly regular occurrence, after a “computer glitch” at the Federal Aviation Administration. Joe Biden made his long-awaited trip to the southern border, where he spent a few hours taking pictures in a Potemkin village on the frontier of what can only be described as an invasion, one which Biden has treacherously encouraged. Amidst all of this pretense and dysfunction, the administration floated a nationwide ban on a common household appliance. Biden’s gas stove ban, the progressive midwits shouted, was both a very good thing and also the latest bugbear crawling in the imaginations of delusional conservatives.
Despite Biden’s much-vaunted “normalcy,” normal has not returned. A deceptive semblance of normalcy, with a corrupt Silent Generation zombie as its face, masks a radical new reality, a tyrannical, devitalized “new normal” of mediocrity. The economy is on the verge of collapse, the price of consumer goods has skyrocketed, and crime is higher than it has been in decades. The flames of George Floyd’s martyrdom have died down, but the revolution still burns with the imprimatur of power. Never has racial hatred been more overtly expressed with such authority to so wide a swath of the country.
We hear the labor market is hot, but service at stores and restaurants is slow to nonexistent. The smell of pot, with its stench of torpor and decay, is inescapable. If you live in the city, odds are your streets have been ceded to criminals and lunatics. The suburbs aren’t safe from the constant schemes of the busybodies, either. These incompetent thugs, equipped with dubious “expertise,” are now accustomed to making more and more intrusive demands of a public demoralized by years of constant, idiotic propaganda. People are now conveyed from one hysteria to the next, almost without time to catch a breath before the next one comes along, with all of the regime-approved talking points and slogans prepared for their consumption.
Meanwhile, America continues to unravel before our very eyes. Mass immigration under Trump received loads of morally charged media coverage but was nowhere close to the scale of Biden’s silent invasion. How many Americans are aware that more than 4 million have flooded our borders in only the past two years? A Third World country wouldn’t tolerate what Biden has unleashed, but the administration has no intention to stop it, and they don’t care who knows it.
As much as one is tempted to blame the “elites”—and they are truly contemptible—the American people share responsibility for failing to rebuke the yoke of this new world order. Our acquiescence has cost us much in a short span of time. Of course, nostalgia can distort even the recent past. America was in dire shape when Trump entered politics promising to make the country “great again.” The best efforts of the most determined patriots would not have been enough to fulfill that pledge in a few years. But compared to the present, 2019 was a golden age, the loss of which it is hard not to mourn.
In Defense of the Sovereign American Constitutional Republic
Is the World Economic Forum’s [WEF] global government what Aldous Huxley warned us about in “The Brave New World”? A dangerous anti-God world of science and efficiency. A government run by an elite thirsting for absolute power over the citizenry? Certainly, it is a frightening proposition we, as a free people, must rise to challenge if we cherish our God-given freedom and sovereignty. King George III in 1775, and later others, tested our strength, quality, resilience, and willingness to fight; and we fought and prevailed. The Japanese Empire also tested our mettle, and we fought its fanatic militarists and prevailed. Now other foreign enemies [in cahoots with American subversive elements in our own government, academia, and private sector] are preparing for war against the citizens of our nation and the world. Let us not falter against their malevolence at this critical hour, or any other hour.
Yet, it is our hope the American patriots we elected to the 181st Congress will stand ready to engage the WEF globalists Klaus Schwab and George Soros proposing to institute a new world order to suppress the free nations of the world. Be reminded that the enemies of freedom began their evil enterprise in the 1930’s; now their heirs in this nascent new century are convinced to be on the verge of entering the final stages of gaining full control of the new ‘brave’ world they plan to attain; this they plan to do by advancing the development of new plagues and famines to reduce the planet’s population for their effective control of its dwindling food supply. Sounds improbable? Well, let us, for a moment, stop and think. In the United States [projected seat of the elites’ global government] the Democrat Party, corrupt and controlled by the WEF and Communist China, is tenaciously committed to a one-party rule; theirs. Whereas the Republican Party is beset by internal squabbling, while the American nation is subliminally manipulated by the WEF propagandists in the media, academia, and big tech.
So, a war against our land, in Davos, has been declared. Let our enemies be told of our determination to win. Though our freedoms and liberties may be under assault, at every dawn and at every sunset, we must pledge, for God and Country, to defend the values and ideals inscribed by our founding fathers in the Constitution of our Republic. Yes, let our enemies know that we have not in mind our surrender but theirs.
May the Lord be our constant companion. Let our hearts not be troubled, for like Joshua at Jericho, our Lord will stand against the enemies of our land.
Best regards to our dearest friend and patriot in the Tundra, GHR. May the Lord’s blessings be always at his door.
Cjack…Sentinel on the Gulf…Tuesday, January 17, 2023
(May God Continue To Bless You, DEAR CJACK…..Will our American Conservatives ever gather to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, or does Gathering Money Command Their Soul?….. ghr!)
Did the prolonged fight for the Speaker’s gavel create circumstances for change in Washington — especially in the Republican party? For the first time in over a century, it took 15 rounds of voting, cajoling, compromise, and almost one fistfight to select a Speaker of the House. The MSM gleefully reported on the “Republican clown show,” predicting that the conflict would split the party. They even fantasized that it could result in a Democrat Speaker, in a majority Republican House of Representatives. What a sweet victory that would be. Well, the Republicans didn’t break up, the Democrats didn’t pull off an upset, and the MSM was blind to something much more significant.
The Dems screwed up — again. They had an opportunity to pick the kind of Speaker they’d like to work with, and they squandered it. If they’d had their thinking caps on, they would have realized that it was to their advantage to vote for Kevin McCarthy — the Republican. They probably could have even negotiated some concessions from McCarthy for their support — because he wanted the job really, really bad. Had the Democrats done so, they could have pulled McCarthy over the finish line, and he would have become the Speaker despite resistance in his own party — before he had to make concessions to that resistance.
It would have been business as usual in the House. The Republican leadership would talk big, but do little — just the way the Democrats like it. The Republican base would become disillusioned, frustrated, and start thinking about sitting out the next election. There would continue to be no accountability for broken promises. Return to Democrat control would be a short two-year wait. For the Dems, it would be like a nice long vacation before returning to work.
But instead, the Democrats unanimously and consistently voted for someone who was never going to be voted the Speaker — regardless of how many rounds of voting occurred. Their rabid base would rather see childish defiant gestures than shrewd tactical maneuvering. They’re beginning to see the cost of that tactical error.
The Republican Freedom Caucus refused to vote for Kevin McCarthy until they got concessions — and boy did they get them. McCarthy wanted the job so bad that he was willing to give up almost anything to get it. The Freedom Caucus figured that out, and played a masterful game of chicken. They got a lot. And what they got may end up changing the mindset of the whole Republican party.
The Freedom Caucus got:
A promise to push several conservative pieces of legislation
A commitment to fiscal constraints
Investigations of deep state corruption
And most significantly, rule changes
Those rule changes include such things as actually coming to work to do the job voters elected congressmen to do, and reading bills before voting on them (yes, they’ve really been passing bills without reading them for years). Perhaps the most significant rule change is one that enables a single House member to call for a vote to remove the Speaker. If McCarthy steps out of line, they can start the contest for his job all over again. They got the ability to hold the Speaker accountable. What a novel concept — accountability in government. I don’t think we’ve ever seen that.
So, what happens when Speaker McCarthy tentatively takes a few steps to the Right (politically and morally), and his popularity explodes? Will he go from being a hostage of the conservatives, to being an enthusiastic supporter of their agenda?
He is beginning to take those baby steps. He’s preparing to remove several of the most repugnant Democrats from their committee assignments. The base is ecstatic. Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, and Ilhan Omar can thank San Fran Nan for setting that precedent — another tactical blunder.
He’s making good on his promise to bring bills that the base wants to the floor. Bills that the House has passed so far include everything necessary to give the Democrats ulcers.
Rescind certain balances made available to the Internal Revenue Service
Born alive abortion survivors protection act
Protecting America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve from China Act
Establishing the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party
Granted, these bills will likely be killed in the Senate or vetoed by the President. At least the Speaker is doing what he does have the power to do — getting every House Democrat on record supporting the killing of newborn babies (aka abortion survivors). Letting the constituents of those Democrats know where their representative’s moral compass points is also a measure of accountability — no?
McCarthy is even talking about releasing all 14,000 hours of security footage from the January 6 insurrection of unarmed cosplay nuts and selfie photographers. Panic is setting in with the Dems. Apparently, they don’t want the public to actually see what happened on that day.
The conservative base is beginning to praise Speaker McCarthy — and he loves it. Will any other Republicans learn from McCarthy’s experience? Will they see that it’s safe to stop being the battered wife of politics? That they can fight back, and win? Will the Republicans finally realize that when one side wants freedom and the other tyranny, it’s not a time for comity and compromise? It’s a time to fight. Will they come to realize that Trump’s success was not an anomaly? His fighting spirit was how he succeeded — and they can do the same.
How different will Washington be if the Republicans stop playing victim, start listening to the voters, and fearlessly deliver for them? I know that’s a lot to ask — and it won’t happen overnight. But we’re seeing those baby steps. The next couple of years may be very interesting — thanks to a colossal tactical error by overconfident Democrats.
The Biden administration observed the MLK Day holiday yesterday by refraining from disclosure of any facts concerning the classified documents discovered in Biden’s possession in locations including the garage of his Wilmington residence. Actually, every day has been a holiday in this sense since the leak letting the world know “how irresponsible” Biden has been, to borrow his judgment on President Trump.
Last week we learned that Biden had retained classified documents in his phony baloney Penn Biden office and at his Wilmington residence. We don’t know what the documents are or what they were doing there. We only know he shouldn’t have had them in his possession. We await the kind of photographic spread the Department of Justice laid out for public consumption in the Trump case.
We know the documents were discovered by Biden’s lawyers, or so they have told us. Indeed, we only know what Biden’s lawyers have told us. We don’t know how his lawyers happened to discover the documents or what they were looking for. We don’t know why they all kept the discovery secret until the leak let the cat out of the bag.
We know that Biden takes classified documents seriously. We know because he has told us so. In other words, we don’t know it at all. He takes classified documents seriously but not literally, or something like that.
Late last week Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a Special Counsel to keep a lid on the matter. Now everyone who knows anything can cite the Special Counsel investigation to justify his or her silence.
Absent the efforts of Republicans in the House of Representatives, we are highly unlikely to learn anything further about the Biden matter any time soon, or discover whether what we have been told so far accords with the facts. They seem to have taken interest in the Biden matter. Thus the heartburn of Ian Sams — White House spokesman for oversight and investigations, Special Assistant to the President, and Senior Advisor to the White House Counsel’s Office.
Much has been made about California leading the country: the Golden State is said to be America’s future, and to some extent, that is happening. But in other respects, as a nation, we’re becoming more like Chicago, and Chicago is our future unless we struggle against progressive policies.
Chicago is perhaps the most solidly Democrat city in America. It has not elected a Republican mayor since 1927. And what it has created in the past 95 years is a society that suffers from inequality, corruption, and violence on a scale beyond anything seen elsewhere in America. Chicago ought to be a case study in what not to do, but liberals like Obama and Biden seem to think it is a blueprint for success — and it is, if only for the political elite who rule over a helpless underclass.
That blueprint involves transforming citizens into clients of the State, a process that progressives have begun calling “democracy.” Progressives intend to establish a socialist totalitarian society with a permanent underclass ruled by a small elite — the so-called vanguard of the proletariat that Lenin said must rule indefinitely until workers were prepared to govern themselves, a day that never has arrived in any communist state.
Chicago employs some 36,000 persons, most of them at or close to six-figure salaries. That would presumably be close to 36,000 (plus family members) votes for Democrats. In addition, more than 14% of Chicago’s population live below the poverty line, though far more receive government benefits — again, an incentive for maintaining the status quo. Couple these with votes from traditionally liberal groups such as teachers, media, social workers, and the wealthy elite, and one can see how Chicago has remained under Democrat control for close to a century. Even if liberal policies are not working for Chicago, they are working, in a narrow sense, at least, for the elite and the underclass whom they rule.
No wonder progressives see Trump as a “threat to democracy”: Trump was elected on the promise of “draining the swamp,” by which he meant just the sort of political corruption that one associates with Chicago politics. He did not succeed, because a vast Deep State of liberal politicians, bureaucrats, media, lobbyists, and corporate partners, to say nothing of millions of welfare clients and so-called community organizers harvesting votes, fought desperately to hold onto power and did so, by every sort of legal and extralegal means.
What prevails in Chicago is the opposite of the American ideal of democracy and opportunity for the common man. That democratic ideology drove America for centuries, even before nationhood, to become the beacon of hope for the world. No one can seriously maintain that Chicago is a beacon of hope. I don’t know anyone who has chosen to spend their golden years in Chicago.
Still, in three key respects, America is becoming more like Chicago, even as more people flee to states like Florida, which is strengthening liberty and freedom. First, the size and control of government at the federal and state level is swelling, and we are seeing government intrusion everywhere, from FBI collusion with social media to increased funding for IRS, EPA, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and thousands of other unelected bureaucracies that legislate and enforce without constitutional authority.
Second, we are seeing a social transformation based on woke principles carried out by media, education, government, and corporations. According to one source, education in Illinois is the “wokest” of any state. As Stanley Kurtz writes, the new Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards (approved by the Illinois State Board of Education) are filled with commands that utterly politicize the classroom and very likely trample the free-speech and religious-liberty rights of teachers. Those who fail to teach “action civics” on behalf of progressive causes are subject to censure and loss of employment. And, as Kurtz notes, the indoctrination practiced in Illinois schools is going national, especially with the support of Biden administration policies on education. “The entire ‘action civics’ program amounts to an open invitation to an overwhelmingly leftist teacher-corps to bring politics into the classroom, thereby recruiting students into a progressive political army.”
Third, we see the wealth redistribution carried out with increased taxation on the middle class — including the silent taxation of inflation — and transfer of wealth via large benefits for those who refuse to work but who are loyal “clients” of the State. Chicago imposes a 10.25% sales tax on top of Illinois’s 4.95% individual income tax rate and a 9.50% corporate income tax rate, and much of this revenue appears to be spent on maintaining a compliant population.
Exactly where does all that income go? According to welfareinfo.com, the poverty rate in Chicago is 43% higher than the state average. Nearly 460,000 Chicagoans live in poverty, out of a population of 2.64 million. But welfare spending is only part of the picture. According to Chicago’s Office of Budget and Management, out of a total budget for 2023 of 16.66 billion, 6.8 billion is spent on “general financing” and 2.3 billion on “finance and administration,” while another 2.11 billion is spent on “community services.”
Administration is a major expense. As of January 2022, Mayor Lightfoot’s salary was $497,000, “though this may increase in the future.” City workers often make six-figure salaries, and, as noted above, there are approximately 36,000 of them.
This is the direction America is going, but there is one further factor: the extent to which the American electorate has been convinced that servitude is really freedom and that disenfranchisement is “democracy.” In the Foreword to the second edition of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley writes that “a really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” With the support of a compliant and utterly biased media, our socialist federal government has succeeded in budgeting $11 trillion in 2022, including $6 trillion in “emergency” COVID and “inflation reduction” spending, and much of that is being spent on “re-education” of the electorate.
The recent $1.7-trillion omnibus spending bill is an opaque document of more than 4,000 pages, but just one line item gives a sense of what progressives are up to: $400 million to be spent on “environmental education.” For the slaves to “love their servitude,” they must be re-educated, and re-educated at the taxpayers’ expense. The bill also devotes $200 million to a “Gender Equity and Equality Action Fund,” another example of re-education spending. The Biden administration has traveled farther into the Brave New World than any before it, and it is determined to complete the job if Biden or a Biden-like surrogate is elected in 2024. When they are finished, America will resemble Chicago with a bit of San Francisco and Portland thrown in.
Americans know that their country is heading in the wrong direction, and Chicago typifies much of what is wrong: government in the hands of a political elite, crime out of control, bloated taxes, intrusive government bureaucracies, and a permanent underclass. And now, just as Obama tried to do before him, Biden is nationalizing the Chicago Way.
Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture, most recently Heartland of the Imagination (2011).
voting on them (yes, they’ve really been passing bills without reading them for years). Perhaps the most significant rule change is one that enables a single House member to call for a vote to remove the Speaker. If McCarthy steps out of line, they can start the contest for his job all over again. They got the ability to hold the Speaker accountable. What a novel concept — accountability in government. I don’t think we’ve ever seen that.
MN Prager Discussion Group 